TAGN did a very nice job filling in for me on the SW:TOR failure front. I agree with everything in his post, and will only add one thing; while it’s obvious now why SW:TOR is a terrible MMO, it’s important to remember that when the 4th pillar was originally announced, lots of bloggers and commenters were convinced BioWare was aiming at the right target. Hell, even as more info about SW:TOR came out, those people were STILL convinced the game was going to work. And 1.7m or whatever even put down $60+ because they still believed.

The great thing about the best blogging gift of 2012 however is that this is just another step on the fail cascade for SW:TOR. As Wilhelm correctly predicts, EAWare is going to do lots of hilarious things with the F2P model for the game. Time to cook up another batch of popcorn and enjoy the next phase of failure. I’m hoping they put out more of those fancy videos explaining things, those were incredibly entertaining.

The other item of hilarious fail is Gevlon. Where to start… (I’d link to the posts, but with Gevlon editing things as heavily as he does, it’s pretty pointless. That said, it is amusing to read his stuff after the fact, and then try to follow the comments as they talk about things that are no longer there. His editing skills need some serious work.)

Gevlon created a Corp, it failed.

Gevlon created another Corp, it also failed.

Gevlon then posted that EVE is less hardcore than WoW, in a sad justification of why he is going to play with Pandas soon.

While all of this was going on, Gevlon continued to fail to get into a Null entity in the batshit crazy way he wanted to. Why no one jumped on the chance to gain a tackle-titan/fleetboost-titan/noob-carrier/noob-logi pilot still remains a mystery to me…

And while ALL of that was happening, he continued to ‘prove’ that being a human market bot was a way to create some modest wealth (for all non-EVE players, 100b ISK is very modest for market players.) Yes, who knew selling Badger IIs, skillbooks, and hardwires for 2-3 hours a day, every day, for six months straight (!) could make you some ISK in EVE. Also I heard you can mine veld in highsec, c/d? The best part here is Gevlon believes he is providing something of value and teaching this revolutionary method to anyone.

Personal and hilarious failure aside, Gevlon’s little adventure into EVE highlights an important aspect of the game; in order to succeed, you must not only have goals, but be able to accomplish them or fail and learn from the failure. Gevlon took the box of Legos that is EVE and tried to do many things with them. To his credit, at least he had some goals. Sadly, due to his nature, he would not listen when people told him you can’t grow grass from Legos. In that he failed in spectacular fashion over (fits) and over (Corps) and over (Null) again, but unlike the rest of humanity, rather than actually learning from those failures he continued to bash his little green head into the learning-curve wall.

And like many, when ultimately faced with the failure of not having any ‘content’, he has decided to return to safer pastures, to pick up Simon Says again, rather than get into anything of substance in EVE. WoW is nice and safe because it always holds your hand, brings you to the next instance, and tells you exactly how good you did and where to go next. Having ‘goals’ in WoW is easy by design, and for those who lack the ability to self-motivate, or to accomplish anything semi-complex, it works perfectly.

By contrast, EVE does not. Or rather, it does not when you fail to accept even the absolute most basic suggestions. It won’t become obvious why your tackle-Titan is a complete failure until the soon-to-be ridiculed killmail shows up, and even then the feedback is still player-based rather than the game itself telling you why. For someone as ‘unique’ as Gevlon, this feedback loop does not work, or works very, very slowly in the most extreme cases.

Gevlon is right in that EVE is easy however. As almost all of the members of my Corp will attest to, being a new player in EVE and being able to accomplish significant goals is not nearly as hard as it first seems on day one. The amount of support, both in-game and on Vent/Mumble that you can provide to someone in EVE is amazingly high compared to WoW. I can bring that day-one pilot into a C6 wormhole and show him the ropes, and within a week he can provide real value in what some would call an ‘end-game’ space in EVE. Of course, I would never take someone like Gevlon, but luckily those types are easy to weed out in the recruitment process, and even if they get past that they have a nice way of killing themselves off, as Gevlon is doing right now.

I think the saddest thing about Gevlon failing in EVE however is that he only did so on his blog. He never, well, did anything in EVE itself. He never got in that Titan to produce a good killmail. He never got a Corp off the ground far enough to have it implode for all to see. He never went into WH space. Never really went into Null. Just sat in a few stations, updated his market orders, and flew his frig around in high-sec.

12 Responses to Captain Gevlon going down with the Tortanic

Glad I was able to fill in. I actually got a couple of thank you comments for providing something of a SynCaine simulation on a day that really called for it.

As for Gevlon, I am sorry he has decided to declare victory over EVE and move on. 100 billion ISK shows an impressive amount of determination. But the market, while central to the EVE experience, is really just one slice of the whole pie. I have ISK, nothing else matters seems an easy out.

But, as you say, he did have goals and declaring your own victory conditions to fit whatever result already occurred is a long standing tradition in EVE. Just read the comments over at EN24.

If you’re willing to slam your head against the station trading/hauling wall? Absolutely. There’s nothing difficult about what Gevlon did. Nothing magical or special. In fact, if he’d been in for more risk, he probably could have done much better than that. He did nothing aside from spend multiple hours per day hauling skillbooks, then ships, then just running buy/sell orders. Nothing new, nothing outstanding, nothing special.

I believe Gevlon is burned out of mind-numbing human bot activities and looking for a way out. 100bil or 500m/hour is nothing spectacular, check market Sell orders, you will see huge amounts of ISK changing hands every day (hint: titans, T2 BPOs, AT prize ships etc.).